Ailing Mars camera is stable – for now

The glitches that seemed to be spreading and worsening on the most powerful camera ever sent to another planet seem to have stabilised. That has left the HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) largely intact – and still capable of returning stunningly detailed pictures. But the cause of the problems remains unknown.

Soon after the August 2005 launch of MRO, noise cropped up in one of HiRISE’s detectors. By late November 2006, the problem had spread to another detector among the 14 pairs in the camera and had worsened in the one that first showed problems (see Mars’s top camera suffers worrying glitch).

Team members worried that the problem could cascade to the point of hobbling the camera. But that danger seems to have passed – for now at least, says Mars programme lead scientist Michael Meyer of NASA headquarters in Washington, DC, US.

“The good news is since January nothing has really changed in the status of the channels,” he said this week at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas, US. “So we’re hopeful that . . . how we’re operating now is how we’ll be operating a year from now.”

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Silent probe

A team at Ball Aerospace, which built the camera, is still investigating the problem, he says.

Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona in Tucson, US, who is in charge of the camera, says this is good news. “It looks more stable now than it was, so that’s good,” he told New Scientist. But he adds that the cause of the problem remains unknown&colon; “We still don’t understand it, so we won’t have much more to say until we do.”

Meyer also said that the team reviewing the sudden silence of the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) in November 2006 is expected to have its report ready by the end of March. He did not comment on the suspected cause of the spacecraft’s disappearance, but reiterated that the spacecraft is “almost certainly” beyond recovery (see Mars probe probably lost forever).

Images taken by other Mars orbiters have failed to turn up the spacecraft, and uncertainty in its position has continued to grow since NASA lost contact with it about four months ago. “It’s been long enough now that we’re not even sure where it is, other than in orbit,” Meyer said.